Sunday, September 4, 2016

Islam is a “criminal” ideology which deserves to be ranked with “Nazism, fascism and communism”, is “incompatible with the principles of European law” and, like its totalitarian predecessors, must inevitably be defeated.

So argues Czech lawyer, activist and politician Klára Samková in a hard hitting lecture she delivered earlier this week in the Czech Parliament to an audience including (some rather bemused) ambassadors from Muslim countries – including the Turkish ambassador who, with several others, walked out half way through.

Her speech – translated here by Luboš Motl – is well worth reading because it addresses issues almost never aired in polite circles in Western democracies, which find it convenient to dismiss them as extremist or Islamophobic or needlessly inflammatory.

Is Islam compatible with Western democracy? Is it capable of reform? Can this end happily?

Samková’s prognosis, on all three counts, is bleak.

The problem with Islam, she argues, is that it’s not so much a religion as a “totalitarian system of governance”. Unlike Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, the religious aspect is secondary to the legal one.

The law is an intrinsic and inseparable part of the Islamic ideology. It constitutes the core of the content of Islam while the rules claimed to be religious or ethical are just secondary and marginal components of the ideology. From the viewpoint of Islam, the concept of religion as a private, intimate matter of an individual is absolutely unacceptable. However, that’s exactly the principle on which today’s Christianity and the civilizations derived from it rely. It’s the private relationship of an individual towards God which is more or less mediated by one of the churches. Even those members of our civilization realm who consider themselves atheists, i.e. those who claim not to believe in God, automatically extract their attitudes to life from the Christian traditions while these traditions take the form of either folklore or cultural automatisms which makes them share the generally accepted spirit of Europe and both Americas. Again, it’s necessary to remind ourselves that this view is not only unacceptable for Islam but it is also denounced and explicitly named as a crime. Islam rejects the individual conception of faith in God and in a totalitarian way, it forbids all doubts about itself.

It is, she goes on, a belief system based on an extremely regressive, joyless view of the world.

Islam doesn’t share the Enlightenment’s idea of the social progress associated with the future. According to Islam, the good times have already taken place – in the era of Prophet Mohammed. The best things that could have been done have already been done, the best thing that could have been written has already been written, namely the Quran.

Rather than working with the world – as Judaism and Christianity, or at least the civilizations that have arisen from them do – Islam is filled with hatred for it.

Judaism, Christianity, and the civilization that arose from them have surpassed this unjustifiable skepticism, this contempt of people for themselves. At the same moment, Islam remained a stillborn infant of gnosis, deformed into a monstrously mutated desire to blend with the Universe again, into a retarded obsessively psychopathic paranoiac vision about the exceptional nature of one’s own path towards the reunification of the essence of one’s devotee with God.

Cruelly, this means that Muslims are not brought closer to but further away from God.

This faulty conception also gives rise to the idea penetrating all of Islam about the identification of matter with evil and the contempt for our civilization which is considered materialistic, and therefore intrinsically evil and clashing with God. It’s a genuine tragedy of the Muslims themselves that they have eternally closed their journey to God by pursuing this dead end.

Its vision of humanity is grim and riddled with self hatred.

Depression, perishing, the absence of faith in the human and his irreplaceable value, skepticism towards the dignity of every human being regardless of his characteristics such as religion, social status, sex, and nationality, that’s what characterizes Islam. Islam has rejected philosophy as we know it, as a possibility of a critical and rational view into the nature of reality.

This attitude is also preventing Muslims from thinking about the questions on human freedom, dignity, the role of a person and the state, and – paradoxically – also the questions about God which became, within the Euro-American civilization context, an inherent component of the schemes of thought pursued by top scientists – astrophysicists, mathematicians, biologists, who are touching the very foundations of the Universe and therefore the essence of God by their research. However, Muslims are forever forbidden to gain any direct contact with God which they lost at the moment of Prophet Mohammed’s death. How immensely desperate their life must be when it’s essentially just the waiting for death.

Unfortunately, Islam doesn’t want to be miserable on its own. It wants to take the rest of the world down with it.

Islam doesn’t respect development, progress, and humanity. In its despair, it is attempting to take the rest of the mankind with it because from the Islamic viewpoint, the rest of the world is futile, useless, and unclean.

This doesn’t make for a particularly cosy relationship with Western liberal democracy. But most politicians and lawmakers, not least in the European Union, are in denial about this.

Islam and its Sharia law is incompatible with the principles of the European law, especially with the rights enumerated in the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (and Freedoms). How is it possible that our law experts don’t see this conflict? How is possible that they remain silent?

Muslims have got very good at exploiting what they perceive as weakness in the West’s liberal values.

Islam likes to hide behind the religious mask [for] its permanent, deliberate, and purposeful abuse of the Euro-American legal system and values that the civilizations built upon the Judeo-Christian foundations have converged to. There’s nothing better or more efficient than to abuse the value system of one’s enemy, especially when I don’t share that system. And that’s exactly how Islam behaves. It wants to be protected according to our tradition which it exploits in this way, while it is not willing to behave reciprocally. It relies on our traditions, it claims that the traditions are important, while behind the scenes, it is laughing at us and our system of values.

In Europe, they justify their demands on the grounds that Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees them freedom of thinking, conscience, and religious faith. But what they – and many lawyers – don’t appreciate as that this Article is subordinate to the one introduced by Winston Churchill, precisely in order to stop the Convention being refused by totalitarian ideologies.

Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein or at their limitation to a greater extent than is provided for in the Convention.

This article was introduced to the Convention by Winston Churchill personally who did it for a special reason, namely as a protection against the totalitarian regimes. He was obviously thinking of the relevant ones of that time, the communist regimes. I have Islam in mind which is equally totalitarian and threatening as the regimes that Winston Churchill was fighting against and which he defeated. The protection by Article 17 correctly applies against any ideology and the fact that the European countries constrained by the Convention decided not to enforce the article so far doesn’t mean that they don’t have the will to do so. These countries are just too kind and benevolent, too aware of the price they have paid while learning about the highest value of the humanity, and too patient.

So far Islam may have made all the running. But it has reckoned without one thing: despite the West’s apparent weakness, the experience of World War II in fact made it tough as nails.

The assumption of the Muslim countries and leaders who have decided to terrorize Europeans by their understanding of the world that the cause of Europe’s inactivity is its weakness, is entirely flawed. Europe has been converging to its opinion and to its world view for the price of tens of millions of human casualties, it has paid by suffering that no Muslim can even imagine.

This will eventually come to a head – and it won’t be pretty.

For some time, Europe will keep on asking this question about the peaceful co-existence. At some moment, the question will undergo a metamorphosis and it will sound very differently. It will no longer be DO YOU WANT TO LIVE WITH US but DO YOU WANT TO LIVE? Do you, the Muslims, want to survive? Because if the devotees of Islam won’t want to live in peace, Europe and America will do what it has done twice when they were threatened by ideologies attacking the essence of the humanity: it will wage a war and crush the enemy.

So it’s in Muslims’ own interests not to go any further down this route.

I am using this gathering and call on all Muslims and all countries that claim that Islam is their religion: Stop it. You are on a wrong track. You are on a track that leads away from God. You are on the road of the murderers. Your death won’t get you to Barbelá, to the land of the non-creator God, but to the land of nothingness and nameless uselessness. Nothing will be left out of you and the name of your alleged religion will only be pronounced when people spit out saliva that was mixed with the dust from the road of the successful, happy, and beloved by God people.

Klára Samková delivered this speech at a conference called “Should we be afraid of Islam” organised by a lawmaker in ANO (the billionaire Babiš’s populist centrist party), Zdenek Soukup. It took place in the Czech parliament and guests included the ambassadors of Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Samková, though an outspoken radical, is definitely not on the far-right. On the contrary, she’s an activist best known for her defence of a a generally unpopular minority group in the Czech Republic – the Roma – and is widely considered to be a Social Justice Warrior. In the past she has also collaborated with the Union of Czech Muslims – though not so much after this speech.

According to Motl:

The speech was generally applauded by almost all Czech commenters at Internet newspapers of all political colors. But she’s not really exceptional, if you get the logic. It’s a speech that she gave, it was tough and sort of nicely constructed. But the underlying ideas are absolutely generically accepted by the Czech society. So she’s been praised to be brave etc. but what she said simply isn’t taboo in our society.

Our government is ambiguous, in between Orban and the EU, but the Czech public is probably generally more hostile towards the Islamic immigration than the publics of other Visegrad (let alone other EU) countries. So she doesn’t become superfamous or a political superstar by such a speech despite the widespread agreement simply because she doesn’t sufficiently differ from other Czechs and she may be considered one-dimensional with these interests.

Perhaps the speech will be received differently elsewhere in the world. But according to Motl, there are reasons why in Czech Republic its stance on Islam will not be considered particularly controversial.

There are various reasons why Czechs are generally more anti-Islamic-immigration than anyone else etc. It’s hard to convey all the correlations and some of them are speculative. But we have the communist experience which made us immune against some cheap propaganda about the social engineering projects and rosy future they will make. Second, in 1938, we were betrayed by the Munich Treaty – this is an indication that the Western capitals sometimes want to decide about our matters without us. So this is similar – instead of the Germans who could spread in all of Europe without limitations in the late 1930s, now it’s the Arabs, and it’s decided in the Western European capitals again.

Then Czechs are atheists and from many perspectives, that places them even further apart from Muslims than Christians are from Muslims, if you get this point. And there are other things. It doesn’t mean that people are irrationally hostile in some way. They’re just reasonable. The country actually has had a long and successful tradition of trade with numerous countries in the Muslim world, tons of weapons trade with Syria – Assad’s father etc., Libya, and so on, and so on, but also tends to be among the most unequivocal allies of Israel. After some Cameron OK, we could sell some 15 airplane fighters to Iraq, L-159, recently, which should be now used against Daesh. So things actually work but it’s a consensus that we shouldn’t let too many of these visitors to come in and reshape the country. Things are OK enough when isolated at different continents.

In the Parliament, KDU-CSL – a Czech “CDU” – is the most German-like party, with opinions perhaps compatible with Merkel’s although surely not so much pro-welcoming. It’s the smallest party in the coalition now. TOP-09, once a part of KDU, is the main party of the opposition that has (weaker) tendencies to support the Brussels policies (but surely not as strongly as Brussels would like). The rest of politics is basically in consensus that the mass immigration shouldn’t be allowed. Some 98% of Czechs say no, over 90% say no even to temporary hosting of genuine refugees from war zones, etc. The atmosphere really is different even than in England.